Action text on interface with displacement on current cursor position

As I was tinkering with my VerbCoin, I tryed out using the "show action text" option.

The VerbCoin is set to be placed at cursor positon (with a small offset) and it works perfectly. The action text though seems not to care about cursor postion and only shows at a fixed location.

Changing the text box size and location only moves around the text but still in a absolute position on the screen. Wherever is the mouse when the interface is showed has no influence on the text location.

Am I doing something wrong ? is it supposed to behave like this ?or is this a known issue ?

Thread Captain

2331 Posts

No, what I hoped to achieve was to have something like a monitor on the VerbCoin, put the "text rectangle" on said monotor. so that when the verbcoin is called (at cursor postion) the Action text would be on the verbcoin's monitor.

And no matter what I do with the text rectangle associated with the interface, it does not stay on said monitor, it just floats on a absolute position of the screen.

Again it may be that "action text" in a interface was not ment to be used with an interface set with "at current cursor position", but with fixed interfaces.

Thread Captain

2331 Posts

Hmm... I'm not sure if it's possible to update the position of the action text? I know that it's possible to change the text that is displayed with the registerHookFunction & the getActionText event flag, but as far as I'm aware only regular displayed texts (character & narration) can have their positions manually forced.

What we could really really really do with is an additional field in the game properties tab of the editor that let's us specify the offset from the mouse cursor position.

Having said that, I assume the verb stuff is an interface & not a mouse cursor, so if you set a custom interface text with the "set area for action text" button on the toolbar area of your interface, then any action text should be centered inside of the polygon you create. I've not used it before, so can't say whether it will work very well, if at all with an interface that is displayed at mouse cursor rather than fixed.

Imperator

6779 Posts

if you set a custom interface text with the "set area for action text" button on the toolbar area of your interface, then any action text should be centered inside of the polygon you create.

Well it does as long as the interface is fixed. If I set the interface's displacement to the "current cursor position" entry, then the interfaces pops up at the right location (near the cursor) but the text stays at a fixed location (top left by default). changing "set area for action text" only shifts the text to a new constant on the screen.

Again I think the action text feature for interface was not put with verbcoin in mind, more with global always on screen interfaces.

too bad It would have been neat to have a little descriptive computer screen on our VerbCoin :p.

Forum Fan

120 Posts

Using the registerHookFunction I mentioned in my last post you could theoretically store the current text value inside of the string field of a VS value. You could then link a display object text to something or maybe a narration text (set to background) to display at begin of each scene & inside of this you link to the relevant value with the vs=value name tag. You would need to have it loop it every x time passed to update the text, but the textPosition event flag of the registerHookFunction would be able to make sure the text is always displayed in the correct position. Is the cursor thing always displayed?

Anyway, it's kind of a little hard to explain with text, but depending on how you plan on setting up your interface it could potentially be a workaround.

I would suggest trying to adjust the x,y position of the action text for game / interface, but according to the data structure they are both unscriptable, though that doesn't necessarily mean that they are, it just means that the edited data won't get saved in the save game files.